Read Part 1 here.
Part Two of Three: ‘Our story begins where this aisle ends’, he said.
If I were asked what happened in the following years, I would shrug and say, ‘Stuff’, squeezing a few decades in one word. Later that year, my Artist kept me aside and picked up better, more ambitious projects. I was reborn from my archives, waiting for the day I would be discarded for His next great creation. That never came. Towards the end of his life, He would say, ‘I just didn’t have it in me after Grinns; that one strip exhausted me.’ His death made him a one-hit wonder and put me firmly in the run for my own collected volume.
A storm whispered in the folds of time and blew the days off the calendars. I found myself bleeding over neighbouring pages, the bright bookshop lights reflected on the slippery paper. A few hundred copies were sold at the launch, a few million afterwards. Newspapers age faster than books—the latter had given me the ability to persist long after they were bookmarked, unread, and forgotten, my character destined to various shades of remembrance. I had also, for the first time, felt a truly eternal grief. Expensive literature demands this much of its characters.
Others felt it too. Calvin and Hobbes, locked forever into cells for human consumption. Holmes, trapped in the similar reworkings of old adventures. Only Blonde had changed. He had, in fact, become quite a star, appearing as life-size cardboard cut-outs at the release of his movies. Though his books barely sold a few copies a month, these movies made big bucks, mostly for the Artists who were reimagining him.
‘The mark of a true character,’ he had said, ‘is to be beyond the constraints of time and culture.’
Aisle 22 tussled at one end with the video counter and at the other staggered into cheap romance. Its entrance was decked with Japanese and American comics that flew off the shelves no sooner had they found their way onto it. Such were the pressures of modern economics, the neon sign that read ‘Graphic Section’ kept them illuminated enough to be pushed into hesitant human hands. At the darker end sat the serious graphic novels, their surfaces fingered through, their pages skipped over in chunks and their order seldom disturbed. They were quite often considered, much less bought.
We sat in the middle, our cartoonish faces charred by the diffused light. There was Holmes and Calvin and I and other folks from The News Express, The London Dispatch and something called The Internet (where we had heard a lot of Artists distributed content for free). We labelled this space as the heart of the aisle, a place thrumming with a new lease on life. Our discovered immortalities were helping us understand a largely unchanging world in new ways.
It was among such concerns one day that a batch of books arrived in thick cardboard boxes. Someone said that there were a few characters there from our old paper. One of Holmes’ many volumes was placed near a catalogue and putting on his monocle, he read it out from across the aisle.
‘There is a Folks From Outer Space,’ he said. ‘I remember these guys; we spent a few years on the fifteenth on The Dispatch.’
‘Something called Peanuts. Anyone know what this is about?’
‘Yet another of Calvin and Hobbes,’ he looked across at us. ‘We are crowding ourselves here.’
‘The Adventurous Young Lady From York,’ he announced. My heart skipped a beat.
A series of images rushed past me—a wayward bench, a large stroller with undecipherable names, a Dover intersection with a single lady looking out into the distance, her hair tracing the grains of the page and a promise—Tomorrow then, she had said—and I found myself shrieking, confessing to the world-famous detective, ‘What did you say there then, Holmes?’
‘Catana Comics, from The Internet,’ he said.
‘No. The one before that.’
‘X. K. C. D. I do not know what that means,’ he shouted, thinking perhaps that my questions were born out of his inaudibility.
‘Not that either, Holmes,’ I shouted back. ‘The one before.’
He peered at the catalogue again and then looked at me puzzled, his lips curving slyly. ‘End of the aisle that way,’ he pointed towards the cheap romances, ‘The Adventurous Young Lady From York.’
I looked towards where he had pointed. Three shelves away and two shelves down sat Margaret, The Adventurous Lady From York, who I had lost in Dover, and it seemed that just yesterday she had promised me a coffee at the corner of Bedford and Kings.
‘I have to reach that shelf, Hobbes,’ I told Hobbes, ‘even if that is the last thing I do.’
‘It is not everyday that a comic turns an action hero,’ Hobbes replied, measuring my proposed journey on scales of impossibility. ‘What kind of a story are you going for here?’
‘I don’t know. I hope our story begins where the aisle ends,’ I said, then added, ‘even if it is the last thing I ever do.’
‘I do not doubt that,’ said Hobbes. ‘Not at all. I do not doubt that it will be the last thing you ever do.’
That night, when the store was locked and the moon kept us company, Aisle 23 was abuzz with whispers going back and forth. Yes, The Adventurous Lady had said, she would be interested in meeting me, a message carried upward and onward through the pages of fifty-seven books like wind rustling through trees. And yes, she had added, she would love to go to Bedford and Kings and drink coffee and make small conversation. As for me, I chose my best self, a revisionist panel where I wore a tuxedo with cuffs, and pushed out slowly from the glossy sheets that could barely restrain me.
I had not anticipated the months of journey I would have to undertake, slipping out of human view in the crowded mornings and reappearing on silent nights. I felt then like countless travelers before me who were expected ages ago, and who, realizing they are late, had put their destinations more to heart than the travel. Who, while they had rushed through a busy street, stumbling and tripping, had practised a million different excuses spoken a million different ways. And who, having covered a distance in space were forced to confront the crushing fact that they had also covered a distance in time.
At every cover, I would knock and someone would pull me in, shoving me gently from page to page. Between the shelves, where the jump from bookend to bookend was beyond even imaginary characters’ leaps, I was hauled with lassos, pitchforks and grapple hooks, falling and disappearing and starting again, covering more ground with each attempt. As I crawled through Aisle 23, through Shelves 32, 33 and 34, I could almost forget the enormity of my act, the defiance of our literary boundaries, as if I had put to test everybody who had ever confined me to my box and her to hers.
I believed then, as I do now, that the direction of our lives had been aligned the first day I saw her sitting, thinking and being the world. I did not believe then, and neither do I now, that she felt the same way about me, that in her turning and saying that I was funny, she had made an observation, not a flirtation. Perhaps to her we were friends or familiar faces during her many travels, a stranger who she would have coffee with in a foreign land and forget and move on to the other strangers and other places and…
The weight of the thought alone had crushed me with the uncertainty of uncertainty and the emptiness of emptiness, the hollows of despair wrought by love. In short, at the end of the last shelf in that row, I was afraid to jump down and knock at her cover.
I sat at the edge considering my options. The moon was directly across from the windowpane, hidden by the linear edges of a skyscraper as black as white our worlds had been.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Calvin asked. ‘Jump already. We will catch you.’
‘Let him be, kid,’ warned Holmes and nodded at me.
There are truths that need to be told. We do not live in a perfect world, rather, we live in many imperfect worlds. Worlds where artists die and people disappear overnight. Worlds so steeped in greyscale that we cannot imagine yellow lakes or red skies or hazel eyes. Worlds that let you live in a hundred fifty pages inside measured squares with bubbles for your thoughts. We live, therefore, also with imperfect stories and imperfect notions of violence, crime, and innocence, and of the makings of love or of the tolls of separation. As characters, this is how we have learnt to live with the world, to make peace with it and to make literature, so that in the deficient explicitness of our words, our subtleties can arise. Our stories both enrich and desert us.
Though I was afraid then to talk to Margaret and tell her how I felt, I knew that if I did not jump down, I would never know enough of how she felt either to be enriched or deserted enough. So I jumped, floating down featherlike and landing with a soft thud. In front of me, a light blue Atlantic stretched out in a book-cover, sea-gulls streaking across a lighter blue sky interwoven with the title: The Adventurous Young Lady From York: Reimagining Visual Constraint In The Postmodern Graphic Novel. I knocked on the cover, a little confident, a little vulnerable. After what seemed like an eternity, the book opened.
‘Margaret,’ I began, ‘I have to tell you…’
Then: ‘There must be some mistake. You, you are not her at all!’
Continued in Part 3
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